Rails Static

Generate static sites with Rails · a step by step guide

Another framework?

The Ruby ecosystem offers many static site generators - Jekyll, Middleman, Kamal Skiff, Sitepress, Bridgetown, High Voltage, Nanoc, … - and countless more exist beyond Ruby.

The intent here is to remove one - to use Rails and all its magic goodies for both dynamic and static sites.

This is not a new framework. It’s a thoughtful collection of existing gems that each excel at one task and integrate seamlessly with Rails.

This very website is generated using this approach - let’s learn how to build and deploy it together!

→ Start with Rails and Hotwire

What you will learn

This guide will teach you how to transform Rails into a powerful static site generator, leveraging a modern Hotwire stack. You will discover how to:

• Create a minimal Rails application optimized for static site generation
• Process markdown content with frontmatter using Decant and kramdown
• Deploy automatically to GitHub Pages with Parklife
• Use ERB template processing for dynamic content generation within markdown files
• Enhance user experience with Turbo Drive for instant page navigation
• Add interactive features using Stimulus controllers
• Manage JavaScript dependencies with Importmap for modern ES modules
• Implement live-reloading during development with Hotwire Spark
• Style your site effortlessly with classless CSS frameworks
• Add syntax highlighting to code blocks with Rouge
• Optimize for SEO with proper web page metadata and Open Graph tags
• Generate XML sitemaps and robots.txt files for search engines

What you need

Before starting, you should have:

• Basic knowledge of Ruby and Rails
• Ruby 3.4+ and Rails 8.0+ installed on your system
• A GitHub account for repository hosting and Pages deployment
• Familiarity with Markdown syntax for content creation
• Basic understanding of JavaScript and CSS
• GitHub CLI installed (optional, for easier repository setup)

→ Start with Rails and Hotwire

About

This guide and website were created by François Catuhe and are available on GitHub.